A Open Letter to All My Bullshit Relatives Cheering on My Impending Death

Hi, it’s me! It occurs to me that we have very different ideas about how health care should be managed in our country. This is no doubt due to the fact that I have a chronic immune disorder (inherited, even! Shit, as my relatives, you too could some day get the same condition!) and you don’t. You haven’t had to actually engage with what passes for health care in this country, especially prior to the passage of the ACA in 2010 when it was a fearful nightmare.

Currently, my medication without insurance – the medication keeping me alive and typing these words – is $1500 a month. When the regime you support removes protections for pre-existing conditions and allows health insurance providers to hike up rates for people like me, and reduce Medicare spending, I wonder who will pay these costs if I lose my job and the health insurance program I have. Will you? Gosh, it sure would seem appropriate for you to do it, since you are so upset about the idea of the government regulating this industry the same way it regulates the safety of our food and water. Remember how bad things were before the government regulated those things? I hate to break this to you, but there is only one law of the absolute free market, and that’s short-term profit. If you like your vacation days, your work hours, your work safety, your roads, safety features in your cars, and countless other protections via regulation that have likely saved both your lives and the lives of your children a million times over, then you might find that you actually prefer regulation to complete anarchy. People are shitty. You know this because your base instincts are some of the shittiest out there. It’s why you believe in the worst in people and why you believe that “those people” should just die if they can’t pay for their drugs. Why help people like your own niece, sister, daughter? You know: people like me?

Thank you for supporting my impending death.

Thank you for supporting the dissolution of the safety net I have known was there since 2010. The net that said, “Hey, if you lose your job, or you decide to write full time, no health insurance company can deny you coverage. You’ll be able to live.” See, I’ve been there before. I’ve lost my job and lived on expired drugs and ran up credit card debt to try and save myself. I did that, and it was a reality I never, ever want to go back to. I feared it so much that when the election happened, despite having a great job, a great spouse, a great life, I wanted to fucking kill myself. I wanted to end it all right there, because I didn’t want to go back to those days, to that huge fear that was always tapping at my shoulder.

That’s how bad those days were for me.

Do you understand?

Do you have any fucking clue what it is, to live that way?

The truth is, you can’t afford my $1500 a month in meds. Neither can my parents (nor should they. I’m 37 years old, for fuck’s sake!). There are two ways to make healthcare even better in this country: further regulate health providers and insurance companies so that they can’t charge obscene rates for things we must have and which don’t cost them very much, and raise taxes on the 1% to ensure our country has more equal distribution of wealth.

That’s it. Easy!

But I known you don’t want that. You won’t support that. And neither will this regime.

So unemployment is death, for me. That’s exactly what they are planning to build. That’s exactly what you have supported, and I never want you to forget it.

Ever.

This is why I want you to fuck off. Fuck so far off your high fucking horse. Fuck off. I wish you the absolute worst of everything. A cancer upon your house. A long and lingering illness for which you need constant care, for ten, twenty, thirty years. I want you kicked out of a hospital because you can’t pay. I want you to feel the full brunt of exactly what you have voted for. I want you to experience your Ayn Randian future to the absolute fullest. I want you to reap what you have sown here. And, more importantly: I want you to understand that you chose this for yourself.

Because it’s not “those other people” you consigned to death and fear and anxiety, which would have been bad enough.

No, it wasn’t “the Other,” to you.

It was me.

Your daughter.

Your sister.

Your niece.

You are a motherfucking monster.

And I will never, ever forgive you for that.

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